May 25, 2018 – Today, only the eldest inhabitants of the Danube Delta recall that, in the past, you could skate on the river practically every winter; since the second half of the 20th century, Europe’s second-largest river has only rarely frozen over. The reason: the rising winter and water temperatures in Central and Eastern […]
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
Posted inEnviro
New study points to global problem with explosives in coastal ecosystems
April 30, 2018 – The coastal Baltic and North Seas are widely littered with over a million tons of intact and corroding munitions, relict from wars since the early 1900s. Sea mines, aerial bombs, torpedo heads, grenades, and ammunition are all commonly found, some in piles on the seafloor where they were intentionally dumped after […]
Posted inSci/Tech
Oil and gas wells as a strong source of greenhouse gases
Aug. 28, 2017 – The pictures went around the world. In April 2010, huge amounts of methane gas escaped from a well below the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico. This “blow-out” caused an explosion, in which eleven people died. For several weeks, oil spilled from the damaged well into the ocean. Fortunately, […]
Posted inEnviro
Monitoring programs massively underestimate human impact on biodiversity
March 20, 2017 – Some of them count the birds at a winter feeder, others walk along a stipulated route, summer after summer, to identify the butterflies they discover along the way. For a long time now, numerous nature enthusiasts have been contributing to the inventory count of biological diversity. Similarly, universities, research institutes and […]